David Gerard writes: Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of online record stores? Hell yes. Unencumbered downloads in any format you like, excellent discoverability and a ridiculously better experience than any other download store. Musicians too: "The interface and the available tools are all so well-thought-out it’s genuinely a pleasure to use." They also like that they straight-up get 85% of the take.

David Gerard writes: "Colourful racing identity" Kim Dotcom has a scheme for his third Mega enterprise: combining MegaUpload with Bitcoin. It is entirely unclear how anything about this makes sense, but I'm sure that with a trustworthy soul with an impeccable track record like Dotcom at the helm, nothing can possibly go badly for anyone involved.

David Gerard writes: SourceForge has taken over control of the GIMP for Windows SF project and is now distributing an adware/malwared installer for GIMP. They also locked out the maintainer, Jernej Simoni. Sourceforge claims it was "abandoned" and they're providing a service by "mirroring" the original, though it's unclear how much value malware adds for the end user, rather than for SF. (This comes two years after SF claiming its malware was just "misunderstood".) Since being busted, SF is now serving an.exe that matches that at the official download site. Other projects recently hijacked by SF include many Apache projects (Allura, Derby, Directory Studio, the Apache HTTP server, Hadoop, OpenOffice, Solr, and Subversion); Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and FireFTP; Evolution and Open-Xchange; Drupal and WordPress; Eclipse, Aptana, Komodo, MonoDevelop, and NetBeans; VLC, Audacious, Banshee.fm, Helix, and Tomahawk media players; and many others.

David Gerard writes: Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn’t piracy — it’s competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians.

David Gerard writes: "Phoronix reports: The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that the GeForce/Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order."

David Gerard writes: "It seems the authors of Stuxnet/Duqu/Flame used the LZO library, which is straight-up GPL. And so, someone has asked the US government to release the code under the GPL. (Other code uses various permissive licenses. As works of the USfederal government, the rest is of course public domain.) Perhaps the author could enlist the SFLC to send a copyright notice to the US government..."

David Gerard writes: "In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core: MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label — "allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings.""

David Gerard writes: "ICANN has decided to be useful for something: it's taking on the timezone database. According to Astrolabe’s latest observations: "Conditions are confused and uncertain. Feelings run high. Perceptions are altered, leading to misunderstandings. Imagination, escapism, and gullibility are factors to contend with.""